Labour’s newly appointed value for money tsar will be paid the equivalent of a £247,000 annual salary, the Government has disclosed, significantly more than the Prime Minister’s pay.
David Goldstone, announced in the Budget as chairman of the Office for Value for Money, will be paid £950 a day for an average commitment of one day a week, the Treasury said on Thursday.
The compensation amounts to £49,400 over the course of a year – equivalent to a full-time salary of £247,000 and significantly more than Sir Keir Starmer’s £166,786 salary.
He has been appointed to the role on a 12-month basis.
Mr Goldstone previously oversaw delivery of the London Olympics, where costs spiralled to £9.35bn.
That was almost four times the initial £2.45bn estimate, based on figures cited by the Labour government in the run-up to the 2012 Games.
Following the Olympics Mr Goldstone moved on to run the London Legacy Development Corporation, where projects including the London Stadium and East Bank cultural district have also reported cost overruns.
He was also chief operating officer at the Ministry of Defence between 2017 and 2020. The Commons public accounts committee said the following year that the MoD had been guilty of “repeatedly wasting taxpayers’ money”, while a Labour report identified £4bn of waste.
More recently, he was criticised by the public accounts committee after taking a £168,000 bonus on top of a £311,000 salary for overseeing non-existent renovation work on the Palace of Westminster.
Mr Goldstone led the Houses of Parliament Restoration & Renewal Delivery Authority for four years before standing down in August, during which time no renovations took place and decisions on the scope of the project were delayed until 2025 at least.
Dame Meg Hillier, the committee’s Labour chair, wrote to Mr Goldstone last November saying the bonus had “surprised us given the slow pace of the programme”.
Cost estimates for the project range from £7bn should MPs vacate Westminster for a decade or more, to as much as £22bn and 76 years were work to take place around them.
In his role as value for money tsar, Mr Goldstone will advise on “how to root out waste and inefficiency” and on “scrutinising investment proposals to ensure they offer value for money”, the Government said.
Mr Goldstone currently occupies three non-executive positions. He has been a director of the submarine delivery agency since 2022 and this year became a director of the projects and programmes committee of GB Nuclear, the former British Nuclear Fuels Ltd.
In June he was appointed as the Treasury’s board representative on the HS2 project, apparently aimed at stemming further costs overruns. Expenses for the truncated line from London to Birmingham stand at £67bn, up from the planned £37.5bn.
Mr Goldstone trained as an accountant with Price Waterhouse and earlier in his career was responsible for developing controversial private finance initiative programmes for schools.
The Treasury was approached for comment.